The Effect of Bad Password Habits on Personal Data Breach

Abstract

Users tend to utilize bad or weak passwords with memorable characteristics such as simple words from the dictionary and easy to remember sequence of numbers from birthdays. Poor or bad password habits lead to compromise of personal data privacy and allow hackers to gain unauthorised access to these passwords and use them for criminal and fraudulent cyber activities. The purpose of this research is to examine the impact of password habits among Malaysians on their personal data breaches. This study provides insights into the behaviour of users concerning their passwords use. This study used a positivism paradigm and applied a quantitative approach and used a convenience sampling technique to collect data from 297 respondents from Malaysian nationals. IBM SPSS AMOS 24 is used to conduct the analysis. The result from the study shows that "lacking the use of second-factor authentication' have a significant and a positive impact on the personal data breaches. Based on this finding, it can be concluded that the lack of second-factor authentication is an essential factor that significantly impacts personal data breach. This finding provides a different perspective from the usual connection of bad password habits of weak password length and combination, easy to guess the password and common password reuse to be the main contributing factor of the personal data breaches by the previous literature. The contribution of this research is the provision of empirical evidence that emphasise the need to continually beef up own security by correctly using second-factor authentication across individual accounts. Doing so is crucial to curb personal data breaches.

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